'India Inc has not seen any improvement in leadership quality'

When it comes to leadership quality, many countries, including India, have not seen much improvement and for those in organisations where there is an improvement, the leaders are seen failing to keep up with their peers, a recent survey said.
For organisations in countries with a deficit in current leadership quality, negative consequences await them as they struggle to succeed in the face of business demands with leaders who lack practised and polished skills, according to Development Dimensions International (DDI) survey Ready-Now Leaders: Meeting Tomorrow's Business Challenges.
Global human resources consulting firm DDI's report surveyed 13,124 leaders, 1,528 global human resource executives and 2,031 organisations from 48 countries and 32 major industries, representing multinationals and local corporations.

When compared to DDI's last two forecasts, the number of leaders who expressed confidence in the overall quality of leadership in their organisation increased slightly as 40 per cent of leaders rated current quality as high.
According to HR professionals, however, the needle hasn't moved at all.
Only one in four organisations evaluated their overall leadership quality as high, apparently, because the development efforts have stalled, despite the fact that it is estimated that some USD 50 billion a year is being spent on developing leaders worldwide, the report said.

"This has been an eye opener about the Achilles heel in business organisations, globally and in India. There is an urgent need for the organisations to deliberate about the underlying issues and look at the requisite measures that could be adopted to lead the change," DDI Managing Director of India and Director of Affiliate Operations Andrew Warren Smith said.

The report further said that this situation is more dire in countries whose bench strength is also low.
"The insufficient talent pool of capable leaders means that tomorrow's leaders may be no more ready to address business challenges than today's and will not have the supply of future leaders they will need to fuel growth, innovation, and execution of business objectives," it explained.
On the other hand, for countries where bench strength exceeds current leader quality, a new group of eager leaders are waiting impatiently to fill higher-level roles as they become available, it added.